1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing method, an image processing apparatus and a program therefor, and is applicable to a case of performing biometrics authentication, for example.
2. Description of the Related Art
Heretofore, as an object of biometrics authentication, there is a blood vessel. Generally, an authentication apparatus registers the image of blood vessels obtained by imaging in a memory as information to identify the living body that was imaged at the time, or determines whether or not the imaged person is the said registered person by comparing with the above registered image of blood vessels.
By the way, in recent years, reducing data amount when in registering data in a memory or the like has been desired. As a countermeasure to this, there has been a technique to register only a feature point (position) in blood vessels in the above image, without registering the image of the blood vessels (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 1998-295674, for example). As a concrete technique to extract a feature point from a blood vessel, there is a technique called Harris Corner, for example.